Hell Divers 2 blew up for reason. The game is action packed, hilarious, immensely fun, 3rd person shooter, PvE, and a game you absolutely owe it to yourself to play with some friends. As someone who finds the shooter genre just very ok I can not recommend this game enough.

It has been since Overwatch (before it sucked) originally came out that me and my friends had a game that we regularly get on every other night and just have a great time together with. For two months me, @Chordata3 and @TSampys25 have regularly got on and just joked, laughed, and had a great time killing robots, bugs, and spreading democracy.

The gameplay loop is great. There are many different missions, across 9 different difficulties, against (at the time of this review) two seperate factions. The first race you are at war with is the alien bug like creatures known as the Termanids. The bugs are aggressive and can overwhelm you with their numbers quickly. The second race is the robot cyborg Automatons. This race while less likely to swarm you and less chaotice are more tactical which makes them in my opinion a scarier threat. With an aresonal of tanks, rocket launchers, grenades, and a whole lot of guns your going to want to seek shelter and be more stealthy in you approach against them. Going from one race to the other almost feels like a separate game. Luckily the game gives you many different weapons you can unlock as some weapons are great against the Termanids but awful against the Automatons and vica versa.

This game can be played alone but I highly recommend playing with friends. Once you get to a high enough level to unlock all the weapons playing on the highest difficulty with some buddies is one of the most fun and rewarding times you can have playing video games.

I will always be thankful @TSampys25 on a whim asked if me and @chordata3 wanted to buy and play Hell Divers 2 together. We had no idea what it even was at the time and its been some of my favorite gaming memories I have with them now.

Now back to spreading liberty, freedom, and democracy.

I just finished Another Crab's Treasure with all achievements with about 21 hours of playtime. One of things I really love about this game is that is comes off as a vibrant, silly, innocent kids game but in reality it's just like every other souls games, it's difficult, it has a dark story, hard bosses, swamps, and... vibrators? but I love every bit of it. There was a few moments in this game where I was soft locked or a bug occurred which was kind of annoying, luckily nothing really ruined my run and the devs are patching the bugs super fast. Other than that, this game is an amazing souls experience and I highly recommend it if you love the soulslike genre.

Narratively simple and mechanically even simpler, there isn't much for Frog Detective (or Frog Tec if you're a Batman fan) to justify it’s forty five minute length beyond its charm. Fortunately, its charm is irresistible; it's lounge jazz soundtrack, clever camera work, and cleanly minimalist 3D art style all supporting the beating heart of Frog Tec, its gently awkward humor. Characters descend into lengthy detours over semantics, bring up their special interests unprompted, and blurt our their insecurities, and it's all presented with sharp wit to make it hilarious.

The gameplay consists entirely of talking to a character and fulfilling their needs or wants, usually by talking to another character or picking up an object lying around not far from them, to solve a mystery that could have been solved if any other character has bothered to do so. As such, Frog Tec conceptualizes detective work as communication, and the interesting thing about that is that our titular Detective isn't that great at communicating either! It's his willingness to push through the awkwardness that distinguishes him, and brings a purpose to the hijinks, as enjoyable as they are on their sake.

They sure did make one of these!

Filled with mixed feelings across the board. The narrative is, broadly speaking, really enjoyable. It's endearing to encounter these characters again in such a new format. Cloud is perfectly communicated as a tryhard, Barrett is a fanatic with the glasses on and a soulful man with the glasses off, Tifa and Aerith are cute. All the key dynamics are beautiful and they feel right. The things that exist in the original game are broadly done right.

Mechanically, it's sort of… muddled. I was surprised to find I actually really enjoyed the action rpg format. I’m a KH nerd, I’m still a sucker. But KH has the advantage of multiple worlds and environments to explore. There’s opportunities to engage with the mechanics and the enemies at your own leisure. By comparison, FF7R is… very linear. Your opportunities to level up or engage with its combat without main-line progression is limited to specific locations, all out of the way of each other. Shinra combat simulators, Collesseums, small enemy zones just outside of limited sidequest chapters. And the sidequest chapters often fall into things I thought we all know got tedious in these kinds of rpgs, chasing down rats and so on. I understand and even sympathize with needing to add time to the clock, to make the purchase worth it, but... man. I just want more character beats. On the other hand, your reward for finishing quests being more character moments is really charming as well. I guess my main issue is that I find exploring Midgar as the city so interesting and fulfilling, while the emptier monster sections feel so constrained and repetitive. Hated Train Graveyard, hated the freeways. I guess it really comes down to the map design. There's so many sections where I just end up staring at the minimap rather than actually looking at the game around me. When the level design is singing, I am in love with the combat and I'm thrilled in each enemy encounter. When the level design is failing, I was constantly begging for the chapter to end.

And then you get to the (I assume well known at this point) rebuild-esque shenanigans, where complicated characters kind of just start repeating the same sort of "I defy my fate" or "the future can be bright" voice lines that just bum me out in a way. While the weird dynamic of the anti-retcon ghosts helping or hindering the party initially makes some interesting narrative complications, the ultimate result is a narrative that just kind of loses my interest compared to the normal intimacy found in the original FF7.

Approaching FF7 decades after the original was a genuinely beautiful experience. I was consistently excited to talk about it, I was never bored or annoyed, all the overhype and preexisting fandom expectations melted away into experiencing Just One Of The Greatest Games Of All Time. FF7Remake looks gorgeous, feels great, and offers so many interesting character moments and divergences. But its broader narrative of trying to reconcile with that overwhelming fan response? Just ultimately kind of goes nowhere for me.

See you in three years when Rebirth gets on PC.

Balatro is a game that caught my eye and immediately knew I had to play it. I’ve been a big fan of many rogue-likes in the past like The Binding of Isaac, and Enter The Gungeon, Though with Balatro, the idea of playing poker hands to score chips with a ton of different jokers that provide different effects, along with some deck building and alterations to essentially rig yourself for success seemed extremely appealing to me due to my history with poker. After around fifty hours with the game, I think it’s an interesting experience, let’s get into it.

Balatro was immediately very addicting and had a great sense of style with the CRT filter, the amazing music creating this laid back atmosphere, and generally nice visuals with pop and flair that never made it boring to look at. You play poker hands to score a certain amount of chips per blind, with eight innings in a given run, winning a run allows you to keep your build going in “Endless Mode” which I never personally delved too much into, but was fun to limit test my decks from time to time. It’s easy enough to understand quickly as well, play poker hands, augment your cards, buy stuff in the shop, find jokers to help make your deck or specific hands better as the chip demand increases per blind. It’s an incredibly simple premise with a lot of satisfaction seeing the numbers go up and watching everything work in tandem like a symphony. It’s no doubt this was fully why I was so enamored by Balatro and found myself playing for several hours at a time. Getting a good build going has that same knowledge requirement and experimentation as the aforementioned rogue-likes, so in this regard, Balatro hits it out of the park, while somehow being more approachable and simple comparatively as well.

It wouldn’t be Balatro without those trusty jokers though. There’s one-hundred and fifty of them in total, each providing a different benefit or effect that will change how you’re playing, and what you build towards. While not every Joker will be unlocked from the start, unlocking them is just as fun as using them I’d say, with a plethora of different unlock conditions for each of them. Others may require you to cater a run specifically to unlock them, but that’s hardly asking much considering their benefit for you in future runs once unlocked. While most jokers will offer you added multiplier and chips to help you clear ante’s, others are a bit more exotic in what they do. For example, “Even Stevens” is a joker that only adds multiplier to cards that are evenly numbered, to the much more niche jokers like “cloud nine” that will provide you a dollar per nine you have in your deck, which could influence you to add/create more nine’s to keep that economy engine going, which may have you running four or five-of-a-kind later on. This sort of snowball effect with jokers is very entertaining and practical for endgame scaling, it all works together very well, not every Joker can be a winner, and some Jokers you’d do well to help you early on, but abandon later due to their poor scaling. With that said, every Joker is a treat to not only look at, but figure out what it does and if you can include it in your build or not, that constant experimentation is what will keep this game alive far past its relevance. It doesn’t even end there as Jokers also have certain rarities that will augment the Joker to provide further benefits, such as additional chips, multiplier, or even an extra Joker slot, which can make taking certain niche Jokers far more viable and interesting.

If Balatro’s core gameplay is losing its luster, playing a new deck is always a good way to spice things up. Initially, Balatro will set you up with the Red Deck, which gives you one extra discard which is decent for a starting deck, but certainly not my first choice. Thankfully unlocking decks is relatively simple, and you’ll quickly have a decent selection you can pick from. The Blue Deck grants you an extra hand every round, arguably more valuable than the Red Deck’s extra discard. Yellow Deck starts you out with ten dollars, allowing you to potentially augment your deck and claim some powerful jokers early. While the first few decks grant you early advantages you can attain in any run, later decks will start changing the fundamental building blocks of the deck itself, as well as mechanics. From the tattered Abandoned Deck that has no face cards, to the appealing checkered deck that only has the spade and heart suits within its library. Every deck emphasizes a certain kind of play, adapting and recognizing them is half the fun, but are varied enough to keep the game fresh and interesting each and every time you make this decision before starting a new run. While the requirements to unlock later decks can be a bit demanding, they no doubt further change how you’ll perceive the game, as well as making specific setups, jokers, and cards far more valuable than they normally would be.

Difficulty in rogue-likes is a delicate balance of luck and skill, Balatro I think mostly sticks the landing here, with a few caveats. Balatro has multiple difficulties you can test your poker-playing skills against after you win a run with a specific deck. Each won run will unlock a new “Stake” which makes the game a bit more limited. From increasing the amount of chips to win per blind, to reducing your money-making, Balatro is rather creative and smart with how it limits the player without drastically altering the core gameplay. I think most of the difficulties here are very pleasant and force you to adapt to them without being frustrating or feeling unfair, which is very important to stress. It becomes even more important when you consider the fact every restriction each stake presents will continue to be applied to every stake afterward, making those last few stakes have a lot you need to keep in mind and strategize around. Let me be perfectly blunt here: Balatro stays incredibly consistent until you reach the Orange Stake. Originally, Orange Stake would begin to increase the price of booster packs incrementally each ante you cleared, by ante eight, the price of booster packs become ludicrous and not worth it. This made specific strategies entirely useless since there was not even a guarantee a useful card would be inside the myriad of different pack options the game presents to you. This further reduced valid strategies and would force players down the route of utilizing high card and pair builds since those hands were the most reliable to play. Without packs, rigging the deck in your favor basically became near-impossible and deeply frustrating. The ratio of luck and skill becomes heavily skewed in Orange Stake, which certainly did not leave me impressed, rather a lot of the flaws in Balatro became far more noticeable to me unfortunately. The reliance on luck to get a good run going was just far too inconsistent to me, and skill was rarely rewarded as much by this point, it certainly was… harrowing.

Gold stake was an even worse offender since it reduced your maximum hand size by one, making certain hands like flush and straight infinitely harder to pull off. All of this served to shatter any balance between luck and skill tremendously, and is by far the worst part of Balatro, or I should say was. Balatro has since been updated, making both Orange and Gold Stake have entirely new gimmicks that don’t fully fix the problem, but are ultimately much better for the game. Orange stake now adds “perishable” jokers which will lose their abilities after five rounds of use. There is a thirty percent chance of any Joker having this perishable sticker, so while it still involves some luck to not get every Joker with this sticker, allowing the pack avenue to stay open can allow for far more strategies and certain hand types to remain viable, which is a very significant improvement. Gold stake has had a similar change with “rentable” Jokers, these Jokers initially only cost one dollar in the store, but at the end of every round, they will charge you three. Not only does this once again not remove the luck factor, but it essentially prioritizes having a good economy or way to make money early, but still far better than what Gold Stake was before. Even with these changes, I think Balatro truly shines at its best on the easiest difficulty: White Stake, and when you’re simply able to have fun and enjoy the game without these restrictions. While the higher difficulties deserve their time in the sun, I don’t think they’re fully necessary to have a complete experience, but if you’re looking for a challenge, you’ll certainly get one!

Balatro does explore other avenues for challenge though, much like its contemporaries. Challenges that alter the rules of the game and force you to adapt to them are always a welcome addition to any rogue-like, and Balatro does a great job here. There are twenty challenges to sink your teeth into, and while they can’t all be winners, the few I had the pleasure of playing, I really enjoyed. Omelet was a particularly fun one, and the first challenge among the list where you will earn no money from any source except selling off cards, and you start with five “Egg Jokers” that increase in value every round. The idea is to sell them off only when you see something you absolutely want or need for your build, which I really liked, it made money far more valuable and really made you weigh your options rather than just burning money whenever you had it in the normal rules. This is just one example, but the challenges here felt very thought-out and valid to have in the game, while some of them can be a bit difficult to grasp or succeed in, it wouldn’t be a challenge if it wasn’t so.

I want to address a bit of controversy about Balatro in how it simulates gambling. The creator himself has denied this design philosophy, but admits the game does have risk/reward elements like any other Rogue-like would. I’ll be the first to admit Balatro became incredibly enticing and hard to put down for me personally, but The Binding of Isaac and Enter The Gungeon were even more so, with five-hundred and eighty hours, and over one-hundred hours respectively, Balatro barely cracked fifty. This is not to say these games are to be avoided or also replicate “gambling” but I do want to say these games are indeed very addicting, but for Balatro I also do not think it’s anywhere close to gambling, at least not any closer than a game like Vampire Survivors which was equally criticized for “replicating” something akin to a slot machine. While I don’t want to delve too deeply into this topic, just know upfront the game should not be affiliated with the negative contexts of gambling, but is certainly fun and hard to pull away from, but so are many other games, especially Rogue-likes.

Some closing thoughts on Balatro as a whole. I think the game is rather remarkable to say the least, while I think certain hand types like flush have far more supporting jokers than something like straight, the general balance and freedom to build whatever deck you want is very satisfying and is really refreshing to play if you’ve been stuck playing basic poker so long. Rigging the odds in your favor by improving your cards, copying them, or outright destroying them are all simple yet effective and provide enough decision weighing to make it very engaging each and every single time. I think the game hits the right difficulty mostly, orange and gold stake to me rely a bit too much on luck even after the changes to find them too compelling or fun, but I’d be doing a huge injustice to say it wasn’t damn satisfying to complete those stakes, much like going all-in when you’re sitting on four-of-a-kind in real poker. Jokers by themselves will define how you play and what you can build towards, but aren’t always so paramount to not experiment with what you can do in any given run, and most have general use to maintain that freedom of expression within deck building that is very much welcome, but also has room for oddly specific Jokers that can turn a simple run into a God run in just a few seconds. At first Balatro dug its hooks deep into me, though overtime it weakened its grip and has comfortably landed somewhere for me as a remarkable game, but not a masterpiece I once thought when doing my first handful of runs. Regardless, I enjoyed my time with Balatro and will be happy to boot it up for a few games every now and again, but certainly not grinding it like I once was. Thank you all for reading this shorter review on Balatro, I’ll see you all in the next one.

Nothing has made my wife laugh harder than Eggman running around the Chao garden. Worth playing even just for that.

The camera and controls are better than the first game, but I missed the hub world with its explorative charm. The story is propelled at a nice clip, even if it is a tad back-loaded (and as occasionally outright embarrassing as any other Sonic story). The Chao garden rules. None of the characters play as poorly as Amy from the previous game.

I think Sonic Adventure 2 is probably the best 3D Sonic game I’ve played, and is positively filled with stuff to do. It’s an easy recommendation for Sonic fans, and really anyone, especially if you have a high jank tolerance.

Also fyi my rating would probably be higher if the 360 version didn’t have a bunch of technical problems. And idk if it’s exclusive to this version, but I once loaded into a bizarre debug room with minimal textures where I couldn’t die and had to restart the game.

there's something to be said about the heavy air of finality revolving around sonic adventure 2 in retrospect. by 2001 i imagine sonic team was looking down the barrel pretty clearly, likely a sinking feeling of defeat as the playstation 2 and gamecube began their respective dynasties, realizing that this project by and large was likely to serve as their last opportunity to say something unless a miracle came about. maybe sonic as a franchise never achieved the epic status of overarching story that this game bolstered in presentation, but this time around, after years of shitting on this game, i finally felt it a little bit. i got what the deal was with sonic adventure 2.

i don't even necessarily know if it's a 'better' game than adventure 1; i'd say it's more likely that it has less widely-spread problems, but those that exist are arguably more egregious. knuckles and rouge's downgrade to their playstyle in this game is frankly fucking inexcusable and rouge's stages in specific are some of the most time-consuming wastes of energy the game has to offer. tails' inclusion borders on irrelevant thanks to his entire playstyle being neutered just to serve as an eggman mechanical partner a-la waluigi's debut in mario tennis - and even then, the actual mecha gameplay is so clearly aping on gamma's from adventure 1 while managing to strip most of the fun of his mode that it's baffling. sonic's moveset received some bizarre changes in between titles (the spindash???) that feel blatantly unnecessary.

with that said, why does this game rank a little higher for me?

look, i'm at a point in my life where objective quality isn't exactly my paradigm with art. i'm not interested in dissolving into "this is better than that objectively because of x y and z." it's lame talk. it's plastic. let's talk about cool, let's talk about expression, let's talk about the obvious passion that went into this fucking janky bizarre mess of a game - a fitting finale with a heart on its sleeves and a love for all things precisely 2001 that likely would've (and should've) seen sonic off at this point in his tenure with sega.

is sonic adventure 2 a good game? well, not really, no. i do think overall thanks to level design, storyline and pacing it's at least a small step over sonic adventure 1 at this point - this being the first time in my life i can actually say i feel that way. but god help me, if something didn't click while sonic and shadow run around the endless stretch of highway and duke it out with pseudo nine inch nails club mixes in the background while shounen-ing up the fuck out of sonic's already attitude-centric aesthetic and storyline. i'm an adventure-era fan now. i love this game now. i'm glad to be on board.

oh yeah, and the scene where eggman pulls a fucking gat on amy rose is peak sonic.

Playing the Hero side of the story felt a little lacking and it didn't really feel like a follow up to the first game. It just didn't feel like an "Adventure" game without the Adventure Fields connecting all the stages together, and I preferred the character select of the first game. The story was also the generic stop Eggman again, which isn't necessarily bad but I do think they should have sprinkled in some things about Gerald and his plans, maybe Tails could have decrypted files or maybe them commenting on the Artificial Chaos'? Cause Heroes story alone felt a bit disconnected from the rest of the game.
All that being said though, my opinion started to change as soon as I started Dark side of the story. It's actually where most of if not all of the plot picks up. And I understand that's by design, you don't get to see the villains thoughts and motives while playing as the heroes. But I still think more could have been done/hinted in Heroes side to connect it without spoiling what you eventually fully learn in Dark and Final stories. And I understand why it's probably more streamlined then the first game, with only 3 gameplay modes and no Adventure Field, they probably couldn't fit all that on a disc and wanting to focus more on the story rather then cutting it up from 6 different points of view. With the lack of Adventure Field they should have used the map the stage select post game has in the story to show how the characters are moving from one place to another to give the sense of connection. But overall I did really enjoy the game!

I do think G.U.N. was underutilized, outside of the intro where they arrest Sonic they don't really feel like an actual presence in the game beyond the generic robots you destroy. Which is surprising with how important they were to the backstory behind the events of the game. I do know/think they do more in later games like "Shadow the Hedgehog", but as their debut it was a little underwhelming.
The Chao Garden was also really improved from the first game! I still think more interactivity and minigames would make it better, but what there is was still really nice. (gonna be a little sad the Chao Gardens don't return in future games)

Oh and one last random thing, the Halloween stage was so funny and out of place lmao. Every other stage is normal and makes sense, a city, a prison, a jungle, a dessert, and then a random Halloween themed area in the middle of all that lol.